Beneath Ceaseless Skies #27 (8 page)

       
“In which of these, Mr. H----, did you find the soul?
 
Was it in the eyes as poets say? Or perhaps the heart? Or is it truly in the mind?”

       
Relief washed over his features and his down-turned eyes shone.
 
He went to a basket piled high with fruit and took from it a round thing with shiny flesh the color of old blood. “Do you know what this is?”

       
I shrugged. It was a fruit of some sort, but like none I had ever seen.

       
“Let me show you.”
 
A small silver pocketknife seemed to appear in his hands and he effortlessly sliced into the fruit’s thick skin. And before my amazed eyes, it began to
bleed
. And more astonishing still, as he split it open, dozens of ruby jewels spilled out onto the table in a small puddle of red juices.
 
Inside pale yellow membranes, hundreds more of these little faceted pieces still rested.

       
“There is no fruit inside? Only all these little…seeds?”

       
“This is a pomegranate. Each one is the fruit. They each make up a little bit of the whole. There is not one flesh inside, but a hundred tiny ones, each sweet and tart and powerful as if they were the size of an apple or a pear.”
 
He popped a few into his mouth and offered some to me.
 
I hesitated.

       
“So, this is like the soul, then?”
 
The thoughts were cloudy, inconstant, but I struggled to bring them together.
 
“Within the body, scores of tiny pieces? Not all of it in one place?”

       
Mr. H----- smiled wider. “Yes.”

       
“How did you find this out?”

       
“It was a long road, strewn with pitfalls.
 
I had once thought to be lauded as a hero of the medical sciences, but now, now I am content to remain in my own private underworld.
 
The world is not ready yet for what I know. The manipulation of life, of death, of the very soul within the body.
 
You saw my driver? He was one of the first.
 
I care nothing for Dollies and Mannequins with hard golden skin and chittering gears.
 
What I build, I create from flesh and bone.”
 
He waited, sounding me out.
 
His face was still serene, but his hands were trembling.
 

       
The room felt chilled around me as the weight of his words settled upon me. He
built
them. “How?”

       
Like a magician executing his great reveal, he threw back a curtain that hung at the far end of the tables.
 
There on a gleaming steel table was a man; a sheet covered his body and a frightening machine whirred and clacked in time to his chest moving up and down.

       
“Sometimes when the injuries are severe, the body begins to fail, but the soul remains.
 
Sometimes I can catch it before it flees.
 
Sometimes I cannot, but the organs are left for my study and ultimately, my use.”

       
“Catch it? The soul?”

       
“Indeed.”

       
I boggled at the thought. “How? Where do you keep them?”

       
He only but shifted his gaze and I followed where he looked.
 
Against the farthest wall was a series of copper boxes with a small glass panel set into the side of each one. And inside, something gleamed, like a flame in a gaslight, it danced.
 
Souls.
 
Dozens upon dozens.
 
My mouth went painfully dry and there was nothing I could think of to say. Nothing.

       
He set his hands on my shoulders. “I am the steward of them.
 
Orphans and invalids and whores, all the forgotten lives.
 
They are remembered in death.”

       
His breath was warm on my neck, yet it raised gooseflesh down both arms. I could feel his heartbeat shuddering though his palms and wrists, and my own lurched in response urging itself into a sympathetic rhythm. And then the soul lights in the copper boxes on the shelves began to thrum in unison along with us. The blood in my veins pounded, the soul in me pounded, and the souls all around me responded in kind.
 
I had not noticed the tears until Mr. H---- gently pressed his handkerchief to the corners of my eyes.

       
“Would you like this knowledge?
 
Think carefully, my sweet, for it means you can never go back to the life you once led.”

       
“But who, then, would mind the Orchard?”

       
“It has been your mother’s matter all along; she must learn to stand on her own and believe that Spring will come, whether you are there or not.”

       
 
“I cannot abandon her.”

       
“She will be angry.”

       
I nodded. The knowledge was there in front of me, resonating with my own heartbeat. I wanted it.

       
“Then say it, let me hear you say it.”

       
“Show me,” I whispered. “Teach me.”

       
He took a pair of goggles, bound in the same gleaming copper as the soul boxes, and placed them on my head like a crown.
 
“Come, then.”

       
I slid the goggles down over my eyes when he did and watched as he put on a pair of rubberized gloves.
 
We stood together beside the man on the steel table; the whir and beep of machinery were the only sounds in the room.
 
Mr. H---- had wheeled over a tray of instruments: scalpels, shears, and a many more sinister looking articles.
 
Beside them was a simple copper box with a small glass pane in one side hooked up to a series of wires and electrodes that was just waiting to be touched to the living essence of this man.

       
“There is one last thing,” he told me. He handed me the pomegranate.

       
I stroked the leathery flesh of the fruit, ran my fingertips across the moist, dimpled membrane inside. Six seeds tumbled out into my hand.
 
I glanced over at the man on the table and I smiled at Mr. H----.
 
The little rubies lay in my palm, drenched in their own pomegranate blood, tiny tidbits of the soul just waiting for me. They burst between my teeth, spilling their juices across my tongue; sweet, tart, and forbidden.

       
Mr. H---- watched me, studying my face in his patient, serene way that I had already come to love. “Is it all that you had hoped?”

       
I could not answer him.
 
Instead I broke the fruit wide apart. Nestled against one another, the seeds gleamed with their own light, calling to me.

       
I ate them. Every last one. And I never looked back.

Copyright © 2009 Sara M. Harvey

Sara M. Harvey is an author and costumer living in Nashville, TN with her husband and their dogs. Her debut novel was
A Year and a Day
, a romantic urban fantasy published in 2006. Currently, she is writing a paranormal Steampunk novella trilogy for Apex Publications that begins with
The Convent of the Pure
. The second installment,
The Labyrinth of the Dead
, will be available in Spring 2010. Visit her Official Author's Site at
http://www.saramharvey.com
.

http://beneath-ceaseless-skies.com/

TO KISS THE GRANITE CHOIR, PT. I

by Michael Anthony Ashley

       
Imre Usaym Balgas stood near the dais alone, waiting to be judged. In a sling at his hip dangled a living sword grown from the bones of a dead man. This he clutched as he watched Bellico punish.

       
Maestro Bellico’s skin was the color of bronze, his features hawkishly angled, his movements lithe. He and the challenger, a stranger to Imre, circled each other with the patient deadliness of warships in deep water, until by some silent agreement they lunged, stone blades colliding with a thunderous report. Thrice more they crossed with rat-a-tat speed—bark and crash and clack—until a sudden red mist wreathed the challenger, and he sagged to the ground in a heap.

       
Bellico raised his stone arm in triumph.

       
The assembly cheered. They were the peers of the clan Baremescre. And each had an arm of stone, the right arm, every one. At the shoulder joint, flesh blended seamlessly with a durable substance that composed the entire limb, inside and out, down to the fingertips. It was iron-hard yet very much alive, able to move, turn, and flex. Each stone arm, or
vesti ferre
as it was called in Silici, differed from the next in color and shape, for it grew according to character.

       
The Baremescre rang out their applause in an amphitheater of sculpted marble, in galleries flanked by ancient archways of wrought stone vines and blossoms cunningly entwined with true ivy.

       
Imre stood in Baremescre garb—linen trousers with a bolt across his chest—upon a tight, pliant sward that made up the amphitheater floor. Even in the dawn chill his bare scalp was beaded with sweat. He struggled mightily to keep his breathing steady. But his father had taught him to at all times observe, so even while his heartbeat raged, he studied. He studied the surgeons as they carried the defeated man away, watched the lurid flow of blood stain the green grass black. He swept his gaze across the gallery, even as dozens of Baremescre gazes bent to take his measure. And most intently he studied the souls upon the dais, for that was where his fate lay.

       
Bellico, with blade in hand and showing no signs of fatigue, had returned to his place next to his wife, Ariosa. Together they ruled the clan, for together they were the deadliest of their people. Two of their children sat beside them: Eroico, a boy at least ten years Imre’s junior who nonetheless served as the clan ambassador, and his sister, slender and grim, Cantiléna with the copper-colored arm.

       
When the assembly had at last settled and Imre’s turn came to approach the platform, he saluted the family in their own fashion, a bow at the waist and a strike at the breast with a closed fist. The thump he produced was a far cry from the mighty clap the Silici folk delivered with the same gesture.

       
“Theca Ariosa, Maestro Bellico,” he said in Silici, “I attend your will.”

       
Bellico shifted his hymn, a blade as wide as Imre and longer than Imre was tall. “Be at ease, peregrin,” he said. The irony was worth scoffing, nearly. The clan chieftain’s weapon was eel-smooth and paler than cream, a platinum vein splashed down its face. It had grown to reflect the heart of its master, pure and firm, large and ferocious. Bellico’s
vesti ferre
was, like his hymn, an impeccable white that gave startling contrast to the swarthiness of his skin, though along the stone forearm were inch-long black spikes. The Maestro had lost an eye when he was younger than Imre. In its place grew a bleached stone horn. What, if anything, he saw with it Imre didn’t know.